


just fine.

by narwhals_and_towers (orphan_account)



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Self Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Transphobia, transgender character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-16 00:19:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16074428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/narwhals_and_towers
Summary: Sarah Myer thinks she has everything in her painful life sorted out.Rhea Millen, not so much.So when Rhea met Sarah at a place she never expected to be, the tables were destined to turn.





	1. Yellow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rhea's P.O.V.

Rhea didn’t know what to think about her eyes.  
They weren’t the kind of eyes you read about in books. Eyes that people looked into for hours and never seemed capable of finding a word to describe their colour. They weren’t a kaleidoscope, of a rainbow, or anything magical. They weren’t an obscure colour either, like red, or yellow, or scarily bright green. The way she saw them, they were just, well, eyes.  
But they weren’t exactly boring. She wasn’t like the character the author explicitly said had dull eyes that were nothing but a boring brown. They were, in a faint way, a tiny bit special. Not special as in deserving-of-an-essay-in-a-shitty-romance-novel special. More like no-you-can’t-stand-with-our-colour-group-on-school-camp special. You’re-standing-with-the-brown-people-and-they-shove-you-over-to-be-with-the-green-eyed-people-who-shove-you-back-at-the-brown-eyed-people type stuff.  
But that didn’t mean anything. As a general rule, they were hazel. It was kinda like god had wanted to give green eyes but had been running out of pigment, so he’d diluted it with a bit of brown.  
Only sometimes, they weren’t.  
It was rare, and she was probably the only one to notice. But if the sunlight was bright enough, and coming in from the right angle, she could glance a look at herself in a mirror and they were beautiful, shining, gold.  
Okay. Maybe not gold. Yellow was a better word for it.  
Which was cool. But she had the same eyes as half her family. It wasn’t just her. And in the end, yellow wasn’t any easier to romanticise than murky, brownish green.


	2. Girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sarah's P.O.V.

Sarah was 13. She was in her 2nd year of high school. Year 8. She was at a boys school, she looked like a guy, and everything in her life was totally shit.  
She’d begged her mother to let her grow her hair out or move school or get girls clothes or SOMETHING!! But she was apparently always going to be Matthias in her mother's eyes. Girls were born girls, boys were born boys. His desire to be a girl was simply an issue with a teenage boys ‘overly active sex drive’, that left him loving girls so much he wanted to be one.  
Which was totally idiotic. Because Sarah was straight. Or, if you viewed her as a boy, she was gay. Either way, Sarah was, without a doubt, attracted to boys.  
It wasn’t anything new, either. She’d always known she was a girl. She’d always loved guys. It’d gotten her a lot of shit when she’d kissed Sam, a straight boy, behind the toilets in year 4. But Sam had known she was a girl, he’d always understood that. At the time, Sam was the only person she’d been out to. They’d been sitting behind the building leaning against a tree.  
“I have something I kinda want to tell you. You probably won't understand, but I trust you, and I think you might have already figured it out a bit, even if you don’t know its possible, but I kinda wanted you to know that I’m a girl”  
Sam had seemed surprised for about 5 seconds.  
And then he’d turned to her and grinned.  
“that’s cool”, he’d said. “My brother’s just like you, he told my parents he was a boy when he was 12. What do you want me to call you?”  
He’d helped her pick out Sarah as a name.  
Then they’d kissed.  
It wasn’t really a romantic kiss. More like a friendship kiss. Or a validation kiss. ‘you don’t look it but you a girl. Me, a straight boy, kissing you proves it.’ That type of thing.  
It was that easy. It wasn’t like that normally. When her mother had decided to send her to a boys school, she argued for hours. She’d begged. Her mother told her she couldn’t go to a girl's one or even co-ed. Her mother just told her that it would fix up all this ‘girl stuff’ and leave her as a shining little boy at the end. She’d argued long, but then her mother had hit her.  
She was scared of her mother. Slaps like that weren’t uncommon. But unlike usual, it wasn’t just one smack.  
It was a belt. It was a night of torture.   
She’d been hurt till she looked her mother in the eye, said she was a boy and agreed to go to the school.  
It had been two years of being at a boy’s only school. And yet Sarah was still a girl.  
There was only one boy she was out to there. Sam. He’d gone to the same school as her mainly for support. To be there when dysphoria set on. So that she’d have someone to hide with and someone who would call her Sarah in a hushed voice when she really needed it. She felt terrible, like she was ruining his high school experience. But he insisted. Which was relatively fortunate. School would most likely have killed her if it wasn’t for his presence, his kind words, and the everlasting knowledge that her name was ‘Sarah’ in her contact in his phone.  
she was 13. She wanted to go on hormones or at least puberty blockers before it was too late. But puberty didn’t discriminate against kids who wanted to look like girls. If her body wanted her to look like she was a guy, then she goddamn would wear her masculine body with pride, even if she didn’t want to.  
There were days when it got too hard. When she gave into the temptation to do things she knew were wrong, things she knew weren’t helping. But they felt like they helped. They were a distraction.  
She wore the winter shirt in summer sometimes.  
Sam knew why. He tried to help. But by 13, after not quite 2 years at the wretched school, things were seeming too bad. Once was okay. Just a slip. But after so long of ‘slipping’ most nights, slips weren’t okay any more.


	3. All of the fuss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rhea's P.O.V.

Boys. Everything important in any teenage girls life. Incentive to wear makeup, a reason to dress up in skirts that showed about as much ass as a t-shirt would, aka too much, an excuse to wear high heels till your feet were too cramped to manage each step, and a reason to go out each night.  
Nothing annoyed her more.  
Rhea just couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.  
She was curled up in her beanbag, reading ‘Life in Outer Space’ for surely the fifteenth time. Boys in romance novels trumped real men any day. The curtains were drawn, her bed was made, there was a blanket over her knees, almost every light was off aside from her bedside lamp and a string of fairly lights above her photo wall. Everything was as it should be.  
Her eyes drifted toward her watch. 11:45pm. In a couple of minutes, she was going t have to get into bed and turn off her light. She wasn’t quite sure what she was planning to do that night. She could write fanfiction, of course, but she wasn’t working on anything. She could always keep reading by torchlight of simply scroll through tumblr for two or three hours. The night was still young.  
But she knew one thing for sure.  
Whatever she did that night did not have to concern boys.  
Rhea just wasn’t quite like those girls. She wasn’t weird or anything, but she didn’t feel at all invested in little sweat bags that didn’t smell nice and went around drunk flaunting their hormones at any girl that came near.  
Okay, she’d started to wonder if maybe she was weird.  
But only in primary school. She thought through since then. She was totally normal.  
There comes an age, when you’re about 10, when your friends really start talking about and getting crushes on guys. You’re young, still at primary school, and extracting another girls crush becomes a mission. Sometimes it’s the first step to setting up an adorable relationship, destined to go absolutely nowhere but maybe include a kiss. It’s fun. Hectic. Until people turn to you. It’s your crush they want to know. It’s you they intend on putting through gruelling hell till you’ve kissed the boy behind the swing set. But she was safe. she told the truth, every time.  
“I don’t have a crush”  
They didn’t believe her, of course, the truth wasn’t working. So she decided it was a lie. she examined the boys, weighing them up. she looked through her past. Every memory with every boy in the year.  
And of course, she came back with two boys that she might have had crushes of without noticing. she never let them know who, but they trusted me more when I showed that required interest in guys. As if it was real for any of them yet. Their hormones hadn’t even started their battles to ruin their lives.  
It was different at high school. Different at fourteen. Liking guys wasn’t just about kissing anymore. You wanted to reach 2nd base, at least. And at a girls school, those chicks were running wild. The lack of boys in the classroom made the streets a rampage to seek a guy to fall in love with, as if they were old enough for that, and sleepovers were no longer about crushes till midnight before falling asleep.  
They were bloodfests.  
Truth or dare, never have I ever, sharing ‘deepest darkest secrets’ and putting on makeup blindfolded. Watching movies till 2am then discussing the deep, the dark, and the dirty. Crushes remained on the agenda, but now they involved Instagram stalks and asking about dating. You found out who’d gotten drunk, who was depressed, bitched about your class and guessed abut who could have lost their virginity. Rhea talked about crushes on my brothers friends, boys who didn’t like her back, and shared her insecurities. Sometimes it was bullshit. Whatever.  
she wasn’t the only girl in my friendship group never to have kissed anyone. There was one other girl. she laughed about it, said that she kinda hated most of the boys in my year, and the ones she'd liked were always her brother's friends, so yeah. Kinda off limits. That was the issue about having a twin brother. He made friends with all the nice guys.  
Rhea was 100% insecure about the fact she’d never kissed anyone. But the truth was, there’d never really been anyone she’d wanted to kiss.


	4. I'm fine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam's P.O.V.

Sarah wasn’t okay.  
And sam knew it.  
He kept glancing at her throughout geography and maths, his eyes darting over at frequent intervals, as if she might just vanish at any moment. She was dressed as usual in the school shorts and a long shirt, with her tie done up sloppily, as if she hadn’t given it much thought that morning. There was a long bruise along her leg: the result of refusing yet another haircut. She hadn’t told him yet that she’d started lying, saying she was a boy, just so that the feminine things could go unnoticed. Sam was a firm believer in honestly.  
So when sam cornered Sarah outside during break, he knew she wasn’t being honest, and god did he hate it.  
“What's up girl?”  
“nothing.”  
“please don’t lie to me. Somethings wrong. What is it.”  
“nothing. I’m fine.”  
‘I’m fine’ is broadly known as code for ‘I’m not okay’. Sam knew that, he’d used it. But he didn’t want to press it.  
“okay.”  
The bell rung out.  
“I have to go. But Sarah, please, be alright. For me.”  
“I will.”, she said.  
But as he turned and started to hurry to P.E., he couldn’t help but fret about her. It wouldn’t be the first time something had gone wrong. He turned back for a second, the thought of skipping floating into his head, but sarah was gone.  
Hopefully not forever


	5. the zero depth kissing virgin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rhea's P.O.V.

But the anxiety she got before a sleepover was already crawling to kick in. It was Saturday night. Everyone was coming over the next Friday night. It had been a year since the last one, and she had felt completely inadequate. She was a kissing virgin (not a thing, but whatever), she had no secrets, and had seemingly zero depth.  
So she crawled under her quilt, grabbed a torch and a piece of paper, and then she did what she did best.  
She compiled a list.  
DEEPEST DARKEST SECRETS  
A list by Rhea Millen  
o That shower thing  
The shower thing. It was a terrible excuse of a secret. She had been about seven, and she’d started peeing in the shower. Her family found out and the French exchange student got blamed. It was totally the kind of secret that any girl with zero depth would have. Yeah, it was totally pathetic.  
o Satan  
Ahhhh yes. The first evidence of most likely having a crap relationship with a totally fine family. Satan didn’t exactly mean satan. It was more like a cue word that she knew, mainly because the real word made her way too uncomfortable. Satan stemmed from ‘satans sacrificial waterfall’. Which stemmed from period. yay.  
It wasn’t anything weird about her period, or something like it being blue or anything. It was just, its existence that bothered her beyond belief, and someone knowing about it would make her want to crawl out of her skin (she knew that for a fact). Which was why she went for two torturous torrents of blood before she told her mum. And she was in any way relieved to have got it out of her way either. Her mum tried to talk about it. Ask questions. Rhea discovered she was excellent at hiding and running away when there was nobody else around. It was painful.  
o That weird fear  
Okay. That was progress. The weird fear could possibly pass as interesting. It could just as easily make her look like a weirdo, or like a terrible teenager, or, it could make her seem weak.  
It was so unlikely, so irrational. nobody she’d ever met seemed to have it. Not the fear that had kept her from enjoying some of the best moments of other peoples lives. Weddings, parties, family functions, going out to dinner, anything. Her gut would twist, she could feel every organ squeezing and distorting, stirring up the greatest of discomfort from the depths of her stomach. And then, once she was in so much pain there was no going back, she would bottle it up. Hold onto the discomfort till the cows came home. Nobody knew anything from the list, but this one was… something else. She knew the word for it.  
But nobody understood.  
Methyphobia was a curse.  
A fear of alcohol, coming round to haunt her.  
o That secret from the dream- only shared under the right circumstances  
Oh. Oh. Oh oh oh oh oh. Oh…. oh. Right.   
Nope. Not important. Not right now and not ever.  
It was a dream she’d had. It probably meant nothing, even though it sure would explain a few things. It was effectively split into two secrets. The dream itself and what she’d got for it. She didn’t plan to tell all the details. Actually, she didn’t really know if she wanted to bring it up at all. But it was on the list. Just in case.  
Because there always was that one person, wasn’t there? The person you want to tell.  
Stupid.  
Rhea looked over her list. 4 points. She was sure there were more, but she’d add them onto the bottom of the list later. She carefully folded the sheet up into quarters and slipped it into her bedside drawer. She grabbed her book off the ground where she’d left it, and opened to her page. She checked the time quickly before she started reading. 12:05. She could read for at least another hour. Maybe two.


	6. lies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sarah's P.O.V.  
> TW: Thoughts of suicide

So sarah had lied to sam. She wasn’t okay. Not okay at all. She was kinda in a dilemma where she wanted to die but was scared to do so.   
And she felt terrible about lying to sam, the only friend she had who she could be totally honest around.  
But that’s the thing about planning to die. You don’t want to hurt anyone.  
So her ultimate death preparation was avoiding people who loved her or mattered to her so that when she finally built up the courage to do what she wanted to do everyone else around her was alright with it.  
She knew it wasn’t nice to dije before she got the opportunity to transition, but the way her world was going, it seemed like she was going to be forced to live as a boy forever. Become a 30 year old man, still being looked over by his mother so that she never got the opportunity to be who she wanted to be and being misgenedered by everyone except poor old sam. If her whole life was going to be as shit as it had been so far, why not shorten the shitness instead of just wasting away?   
So she was suicidal. Maybe not fine.  
But after everything, she was too scared to admit she wasn’t okay. It seemed to her that sam was alreading doing all he could. There was no helping him. It would be better off if she just died, quickly and hopefully painfully. she craved the eternity and simplicity that could be found in death.  
It seemed quite an improvement to her current situation, which was sitting in one of the cubicles in the (boys) bathroom, trying not to cry and pondering if maybe she should get her big fat ass out of the cubicle and go to art class.


	7. not just paper planes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rhea's P.O.V.

There was definitely something very special about paper. Paper planes, for instance, could keep children occupied for hours. And yet they were simply sheets of paper, folded and distorted to create a sometimes aerodynamic, sometimes not, vessel.   
There was, of course, drawing. It was terribly stressful, of course, and impossible to do any well at, but it was fun, and sometimes, though rarely, it was beautiful and satisfying. So not worth the horrors you had to put on the paper before success, but still fun.  
Then there was writing. A way to spill your thoughts onto paper, a way to create a whole new world, a method of teleportation that could materialise you anywhere you wanted. It was like dreaming, only you were in total control. With a sheet of paper and a pen, Rhea could fly, or go to space, or end up in a world where Donald trump didn’t exist and it was socially acceptable to stay up till 2am being antisocial instead of going out to parties and kissing guys you were never going to see again, but you could taste the liquor on their lips, and you knew that they wouldn’t remember it. Honestly, socially acceptable or not, rhea still did this, which was why all that she knew about boys came from reading.  
Which got her to the last point on her list. Books.  
Rhea couldn’t imagine a world without them. Everything about a good novel was perfect. The cover of every book was a new realm, a brand new, beautiful creation. It was a pinprick, a tiny keyhole into what the story held. Just a taste, a hook. Beautiful. One of her favourite things to do when a book was purchased, her’s at last, was smell it. She would lift the pages to her face, and then bury herself in them. She would breathe in, long, deep breathes and try to pick up every smell. The soft woodiness, the strong ink.  
But her favourite part of a book was the words. Scrawled over each page was another universe. A new girl, a new story, a world where she wasn’t plain old her. It was a universe where problems were resolved. Where she could be happy. There wasn’t as much freedom as in writing, but the style was different. The protagonist wasn’t just her, tweaked a little, or based on anyone she knew. It wasn’t anything like being in one of her own universes.   
Because for once, when reading, she could travel to someone else’s.   
That was without a doubt, the best thing about paper.


	8. In the end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sarah's P.O.V.  
> TW: Thoughts of suicide

There's this thing.  
They call it death.  
One cannot tell where it leads.  
To heaven,  
To hell,  
Or to somewhere else.  
But without knowledge  
Of what lies beyond its grasp,  
Why should we flee it?  
Potential beauty,  
Potential freedom,  
Potential joy.  
Who knows?  
If we’ll meet our lovers again.  
If we’ll get that extra chance.  
It’s inevitable,  
And yet,  
We pretend,  
Just for a moment,  
That we might just be eternal.  
It’s time to stop pretending…  
It’s time to go to sleep.

Sarah opened her eyes hastily.  
‘not yet’, she pleaded to herself. ‘Please, not yet.’

 

In the end Sarah hadn’t gone to art class.


End file.
